Technology

President Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon and three others were arrested and are charged with fraud over a crowdfunded wall along the US-Mexico border. The “We Build the Wall” campaign collected over $25 million to construct the border wall proposed by President Donald Trump. But prosecutors claim that Bannon, We Build the Wall founder Brian Kolfage, and their associates Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars toward personal expenses. The recently unsealed case alleges that Bannon and others broke repeated promises to put “100 percent” of donations toward the wall. The group secretly arranged private payments through a nonprofit, giving Kolfage $100,000 within months of starting fundraising. While claiming the funds went toward social media ex...

Vitagene, a company that makes mail-in, saliva-based COVID-19 tests, is switching its shipping from the United States Postal Service to FedEx, its CEO told The Verge. “We’ve had problems with USPS recently, in terms of tracking packages and the delivery of packages,” says CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia. Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who took the position at the head of USPS in June, has instituted cost-cutting changes (like cutting overtime for postal workers) that have been criticized by lawmakers and the USPS workers union for slowing mail service. Vitagene started noticing the delays about three or four weeks ago, Maghsoodnia says. The number of customers calling the company to ask about the timing of their shipments because of those delays has ballooned to two or three times t...

In June this year, Reddit began a huge campaign to remove hateful content from its site, blocking communities that engaged in hate speech and harassment. In an update on its progress today, the company says it’s banned nearly 7,000 subreddits (including repeat offenders) resulting in an 18 percent drop in users posting hateful content. “While I would love that number to be 100 percent, I’m encouraged by the progress,” writes Reddit user u/worstnerd, a member of the company’s Safety team. “While I would love that number to be 100 percent, I’m encouraged by the progress.” The progress is part of a sea change at Reddit after the site introduced new policies that explicitly ban hate speech and promised to enforce them rigorously. Reddit has long been criticized for tolerating racist and misogy...

Lyft will suspend its ride-hailing operations in California at 11:59PM PT on August 20th, the company confirmed in a blog post. Along with Uber, the company was ordered by a state judge to employ its drivers rather than classify them as independent contractors. But Lyft is choosing to end its service in California rather than comply with that order — at least for now. “This is not something we wanted to do, as we know millions of Californians depend on Lyft for daily, essential trips,” the company writes. “We’re personally reaching out to riders and drivers to share more about why this is happening, what you can do about it, and to provide some transportation alternatives.” Uber has also said it will cease operations in California at the end of the day, though it has yet to officially conf...

Sony has unveiled a new program for Windows 10 that makes it easier to use the company’s digital cameras as webcams. The software is called Imaging Edge Webcam and allows you to connect your Sony camera to your PC via USB without the need for additional hardware like a USB capture card. That means you can get a huge boost in image quality compared to most traditional webcams. Unfortunately, there’s no mention of a version for macOS. Sony says that a total of 35 of its cameras are compatible with the new software, including the newly announced Alpha 7S III. Other supported models include the Alpha 9 II, Alpha 9, Alpha 7R IV, Alpha 7R III, Alpha 7R II, Alpha 7S II, Alpha 7S, Alpha 7 III, Alpha 7 II, Alpha 6600, Alpha 6400, Alpha 6100, RX100 VII, RX100 VI, RX0 II, RX0, and vlog camera ZV-1. A...

Microsoft Flight Simulator produces some stunning realism most of the time, but there’s the odd occasion where things go hilariously wrong. PC players inside simulated airplanes have been scouring the globe this week and have discovered some rather amusing glitches. The biggest discovery is a giant mountain-high obelisk in Melbourne, Australia. The unusually tall building doesn’t exist in real life, but Bing Maps thinks a giant obelisk dominates the skies of northern Melbourne. Microsoft Flight Simulator utilizes Microsoft’s Bing Maps technology — streaming data directly from two petabytes of storage in the cloud — so it’s likely that this particular glitch is based on incorrect Bing Maps data. In Microsoft Flight Simulator a bizarrely eldritch, impossibly narrow skyscraper pierces the ski...

A couple of weeks before the first day of school, Amanda received a welcome kit from the Texas high school she’s set to teach theater at this year. The kit included a cloth mask and a face shield — the personal protective equipment (PPE) she’s expected to wear when she spends time on campus this semester. However, neither piece seemed particularly reliable. “It’s a three-layer cloth mask— it’s not a medical mask — and the face shield looks like it was made by a Booster Club,” Amanda tells The Verge. “But I mean, I’ll take it because I know some of my other teacher friends aren’t receiving PPE at all; they’re having to pay out of pocket to get masks for themselves.” Amanda officially started teaching classes this week, along with thousands of other teachers across the country. Amanda is not...

Western Digital has along since a mainstay for portable hard drives with its popular My Passport line, but its recently started to shift its focus to solid-state drives — and now the company is launching its second-generation My Passport SSD lineup, which brings even faster speeds than the original. The new My Passport SSDs borrow from the overall design language from the current hard drive models, but replace the angular corners and waves with a more rounded design to tell the two lines apart. The idea is that the hard drive lineup — with its larger capacities of up to 5TBs on a single device — will serve customers looking for sheer storage, while the new SSDs will offer better speed and durability. Speed is the name of the game here: the new drive supports the USB-C 3.2 Gen-2 standard, a...

Taiwan is planning to lock out video streaming services from Chinese tech giants Baidu and Tencent. While such services are ostensibly already illegal in the self-governing island republic, Baidu’s iQiyi and Tencent’s WeTV currently operate under a legal loophole that allowed them to partner with local companies. Now, Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs says that Taiwanese companies won’t be able to provide these services as of September 3rd. The move shows how Chinese tech companies are facing increasing difficulty in pushing into other markets as geopolitical tensions continue to rise. President Trump has moved to ban Tencent’s WeChat and ordered ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok’s US operations, while India blocked dozens more Chinese apps earlier this year. China claims Taiwan as ...

A number of Google services including Gmail, Drive, Docs, Meet, Groups, Chat, Keep and Voice are experiencing service disruptions, the company is reporting on its G Suite Status Dashboard. We’ve verified that file uploads are failing across Google’s services, including uploading attachments in Gmail to both personal and G Suite gmail accounts. In some cases trying to simply compose a new email or a reply fails. Google first said it was investigating issues with Gmail at 1:29AM ET. It later provided official confirmation of a range of issues: Gmail sending issues, Meet recording issues, Creating files issues in Drive, CSV user upload issues in Admin Console, Posting message issues in Google Chat As of 3:12AM ET Google says its investigation is ongoing, and that it intends to provide an upda...

While the world writhes in the clutches of a seemingly never-ending wave of chaos, one Twitch streamer’s heartwarming struggle to win a game of the new battle royale sensation Fall Guys is a story we can all happily rally around. Timothy “TimTheTatMan” Betar, a streamer best known for playing popular battle royale games and his tight friendships with other well-known names in the Fornite and adjacent communities, has been struggling to claim a crown since the release of UK developer Mediatonic’s Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout on August 4th. His countless failed attempts and increasingly comical frustration morphed into a meme, with the official Fall Guys Twitter account goading and trolling him for his failures and fellow streamers poking fun. But on Wednesday, Tim claimed victory — and did ...

Airbnb has filed documents to begin its initial public offering, the company said on Wednesday. Airbnb’s securities registration filing remains confidential, but it has been submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission, beginning the process that will ultimately allow everyday investors to purchase shares in the company for the first time. The company has yet to determine the specifics of the public offering, including share price and the number of shares to be offered. Airbnb had previously discussed its intention to go public this month despite the ongoing financial fallout from the pandemic, which resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in refunds and cancellations on Airbnb’s platform. In the wake of that economic damage, The Wall Street Journal valued the company at $18 bil...